


The Canary

by Gabri



Series: The Sky in a Cage [2]
Category: How to Train Your Dragon (2010), Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Abuse, Brainwashing, Confinement, Dark!Jack, M/M, Mental Disintegration, Sexual Violence, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-21
Updated: 2014-04-21
Packaged: 2018-01-20 05:50:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1498990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gabri/pseuds/Gabri
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I <i>wanted</i> him." Jack whispered back at last, low and fierce with all the spoiled entitlement of a favorite child.</p><p>"Yes," Pitch said sweetly. "And now you have him." Hiccup could feel the glass-gold cut of his eyes scanning over him with a sneer of disgust. "...needy, inconvenient thing that he is."</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Canary

**Author's Note:**

> re-posting as one piece because the chapter format was beginning to drive me nuts and after reading through my draft again I do think it's better as a single thing
> 
> so here's the Canary in it's entirety. Sorry for the confusion there .___.
> 
> There should be more to this as a series, though I haven't decided the exact order of the rest yet. This is directly continuing from the events of the sky in a cage, which was always supposed to be longer but took a lot to actually make myself continue u--u Hope-for-snow was a big brainstorming help for how to actually make this work so big thanks to you dear ;u;
> 
> again watch the tags and beware the very very very unreliable narrator.
> 
> and once again sorry for the cray wait and posting troubles. ;;; it's over now hahahhh
> 
> bonus art/tumblr link -- x

He usually fell asleep after Jack was finished. It had become a habit, spurred on by the soothing sounds of praise and the rhythmic lull of fingers through his hair. He had never payed much attention to the part where Jack untangled their limbs and padded barefoot to lock the cage closed behind him until the day finally came that Hiccup opened his eyes to find the door still swinging open on its hinges.

He had always known his world to be such a tiny thing. Ten paces would be enough to cross the entire distance of the steel beneath his feet. It was enough to stretch himself fully across without touching either side. Enough to roll over without bumping knees or elbows. 

More than enough to be comfortable.

And he _was_ comfortable. Hiccup couldn't imagine being more content, although there was a certain aimlessness when his master was not around that made his brain feel terribly empty, as shapeless and swirling as the fearlings whispering beneath his ankles. He watched them as he was, swinging his legs vacantly through the gap left by the open door and into the wash of stone-broken blackness stretched out below. The dark was so perfect that his pale gray legs seemed unnaturally bright against it; one bare foot peppered in freckles, the other gone entirely. A metal stub. It interested him in the way that the sinking ruins interested him, or anything that wasn't Jack interested him - which was to say it was just another thing to train his eyes on for lack of a better subject. 

It shouldn't have made a difference, that metal foot; it wasn't particularly better or worse than the flesh one. But his eyes went to it automatically as he dangled his legs off the mouth of the cage, and in the spaces between Jack's visits he began to know every subtle scratch upon the surface almost as well as he knew the tiny creases inside his master's palms.

There were Nightmares screaming in the distance. Commonplace, but still startlingly loud. Hiccup lifted his head as they passed, an entire horde of them. A few stopped to sniff at his cage or nudge at his feet, circling, before charging onward in a rush. Their scent was fuller than before - more satisfied than their usual greedy aura of returning home from a meal. 

The echo of approaching laughter was more satisfied, too.

Hiccup folded his legs back through the door and pushed himself upright, gripping at the bars for support. The deep, manic rumble grew closer by the second. He usually had more time than this before the Prince was upon him -- Jack was quick, but tonight he was like lightening, zipping through the ruins in a blue-black blur. There was a drum in Hiccup's chest, a wasps nest buzzing to life between his ribs as the distance between them decreased.

"You're--you're _home--_ " he stammered out as the voice's owner perched, grinning, outside of his cage. The joyful cackling came with a charge, and already he could feel the aimlessness in his brain lifting. His own greeting sounded small, distant. Even Jack couldn't seem to hear him. It figured, Hiccup could barely hear _himself._

And something was...different. 

Not wrong, but _different._ Bigger. _Powerful._ Something had happened and it was hanging in their air, a lingering scent of rare and valuable fear that surged through the Fearling Prince like a shockwave.

Jack pushed himself through the open door, vibrant with glee and perfectly unbothered by the violent lurching of floor beneath him. Hiccup stumbled for him - he couldn't even manage a tenth of Jack's natural aerial grace - and in a heartbeat the Prince had him upright, gripping at his upper arms so tightly that his thumb and forefinger nearly touched. 

"--she _saw_ me!" he babbled excitedly, and Hiccup sucked in a trembling breath. The air was thick with adrenaline, the high of dominance and freshly fed monsters, but with Jack mere inches from him the intensity of its power was that much stronger. He was all but bursting with it, hardly able to keep himself still. "My shadow, too! I got up behind her first, and she sees the shadow of my hand creeping up the wall..." His fingers tapped like spider-legs in giddy demonstration. "...you should have _seen_ her!"

He was already half-hard. Hiccup could see that much. He reached on instinct, flattening a hand over Jack's belly, letting the waves of his master's victory roll over him like a drug. "You should have seen her face when she woke up...!" he continued with feverish hunger, unmoving except to stroke the pad of one thumb over Hiccup's arm in slow, tight circles. "You would have _loved_ it, it was so awesome - you should have heard her scream when I said your name--"

"'m listening..." Hiccup tried pleadingly.

"Well, she's not here _now._ " Jack laughed affectionately, chiding. "She's up there with the rest of them. You know, above."

"Above...." He repeated it wonderingly, for lack of anything else to say. It was just a word, meaningless, but it meant something to Jack and that something was powerful and grand. He had seen Jack in pleasure a thousand times before, but never quite like this. It was a fog that filled his brain, blurring out everything else beyond their contact as Jack cocked his head, maddeningly casual but rapt with interest. Watching. 

"Pitch says maybe someday you can come with us." he suggested as Hiccup buried his face in the hollow of his throat, nuzzling the place where his pulse always thudded a beat too slow. He could almost taste the blood underneath, cold and berry blue, straining in his neck and chest and flush against his bare palm. "That's a big 'maybe' for him, though. Maybe if you're extra good. You can be good, right Hic?" 

He chuckled quietly when Hiccup gave a throaty moan in response. 

"Boy, you really want it, don't you...."

" _Yes._ " Hiccup whined, because _Jack_ wanted it, he could feel it. This was the only thing that made sense, the only thing that felt _important_ and not just blurry and distant and blank. He knew how to do this. He was _wired_ for this. For him. " _Jack..._ "

Jack laughed again, delighted, the sound of it crackling like electricity over his skin. "What do we say, sweetheart?" 

" _Please_...just, can you just....?"

"That's it~! That's a good boy."

He kissed his forehead first, adoring. The shadows were melting off him at will and Hiccup surged in immediately, near trembling in his need. He fumbled to his knees the moment the grip let up, barely registering the impact of the floor against his legs in his haste to reach his goal. Jack slid a hand in his hair and for one lovely moment Hiccup allowed to himself reveal in the praising note of his touch before the fingers fisted tight and jerked his head back sharply.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa--!" He scolded, "Slow down, none of that now. Nothing in your mouth, come on. I wanna hear you."

"Yes--" Hiccup heard himself stammer back, automatic and eager, _yes, yes, yes,_ and when Jack pushed him flat on his back a moment later he obediently refrained from biting down on the gasp that rose into his throat. He could feel the weight of him like a blanket, the icy fingers that held his hips firmly in place as Hiccup tried to surge forward, press himself into all the negative spaces. He felt like a puzzle piece, a tiny fragment removed from a greater picture, and the need to see what their colors created when finally combined was so strong it was enough to drive him mad.

Hands on his thighs, stroking. Spreading him open. His own voice in the air, swelling and catching and utterly naked. Everything clicked into place when Jack forced himself inside, as easily as if he had never left, and Hiccup's tiny world of black bars and gray sky and ten paces of steel beneath his feet zeroed down to nothing expect the places where his owner's skin burned white-hot against his own.

This part came so _naturally._ The thoughtlessness of rolling his hips forward, scraping his fingers over freezing shoulders and letting every tangled moan fill up the gaps between the bars. It was like being rewritten with Jack inside him, as if he could finally understand how alone he was an only empty book, bones on paper, and the chilly breath on his neck and the scraping of nails over his sides was like the comfort of words filling him up again.

Jack breathed frigid air against his pulse, pausing in his movements long enough to splay his hand over Hiccup's chest, directly over the rapid beating within. His bare palm blazed, a sensation sinking through his skin until Hiccup could almost picture the white-gray fingers curling snug around his heart. 

He kept his mouth open, gasping and gagging on the moans that spilled out one right after the other. And it wasn't enough, not nearly, but Jack seemed to know what what was missing.

" _Scream._ " he ordered hungrily.

So Hiccup drew in a breath to scream. 

It couldn't have been any imitation of what they had heard before - the noise from those 'above' places, the sounds that Jack swore they could draw from the sleeping. This was a purely pleasured thing, broken and punctured by wet thrusts, unhinged by instruction. It urged on their coupling, magnified a thousand times over in the stillness of underground as Jack's hands crawled over his ribs, his chest, settling heavy over his throat and forming a collar there with his fingers. 

It was bliss, being so thoroughly owned, even when the circle of his hands locked in tight and then tighter. Even as black spots began to form before his eyes. Even as, from a thousand miles away, Hiccup heard the sounds of his own screaming become harsh and strangled.

"-- _louder_ \--"

 _Yes_ \-- Hiccup thought helplessly. _Yes, okay --_

His thrusts were becoming sloppy and shallow, only Hiccup couldn't meet them anymore. His body wasn't listening despite the beat of _yes_ and _more_ and _please_ pulsing through his brain like a second heartbeat. There was a fire in his lungs, consuming, a desperation washed over the natural high of his master's attentions -- because he knew what he had to do but at the same time he _couldn't_ \- Jack was squeezing and he _couldn't--_

\--and then his fingers eased up and he was coughing, shuddering through ragged breaths before managing enough oxygen to cough all over again. Jack collected him carefully, gathering him up into his arms. He was freezing to touch, more so than Hiccup had come to expect, and the contact of new skin sent a shock through him as he took in their new position -- he hadn't even realized it was over until it was _over._

He hadn't....

The shame that washed over him was something akin to fear. They were separated again, semen cooling on his thighs, but he hadn't even _realized..._

He couldn't say sorry. Jack was shushing him, which was an order in its own right: no more noise. So Hiccup lay still, trembling uncontrollably, taking meticulous note of the fresh aching renewed in his body. It was different this time: sharper. Fire in his lungs. A ring of it around his throat. This was new, almost alarming... Jack had never brought fire with his touches before.

"You did good," he whispered, and the fear quickly melted into relief. There were hands in his hair, stroking and petting as if he were a child. " _So_ good. Thank you..." Kisses. Hiccup soaked them up like sunrays, pressing his face into Jack's collar where his heartbeat thrummed in quickening chords. "Did you like it too?"

 _Gods, yes,_ Hiccup thought wildly. _I loved it. I love you._ There was so much more to confess, an entire novel carved fresh into his skin, but his throat couldn't form the words. Jack didn't seem dissatisfied with his inability to answer. He pressed his lips to his forehead, then his cheek, and finally to the foreign ache burning at his throat. 

Hiccup stared contently at the darkness beyond them. 

It was so _quiet._ He usually drifted off in the afterglow, just listening to their heartbeats, but sleep wouldn't come now. He could hear Jack's murmurs, throaty sounds, so different from the bell of his laughter. He could hear the ugly rasp of his own voice, uneven and gasping, pausing now and again to be swallowed up by Jack's chilly lips. 

There was dust in his hair, or dirt. That was new, too. 

Strange, but not important. 

Tiny raindrops of debris filtering outside his cage. So strange...

A distant rumble from above...

_Above._

"Oh...!" Hiccup heard himself say. Just like that - _oh!_ \- as if he were a spectator at a show and that distant rumble was a stage trick, a tip of the hat for his ears alone. It sounded all wrong, too loud against Jack's whispering, but the power behind it was of a different sort. It was getting louder as the seconds passed, stronger, broken in places as if the sound's conductor was losing its patience.

 _\--but not important,_ Hiccup thought automatically. And of course that was true - Jack's mouth was on his throat; _that_ was something of real importance. One hand was curled at his waist. The other on his thigh. And it was perfect, really - he wanted nothing more than to stay tucked into that embrace forever.

The rumbling picked up. It shook the ceiling once, dislodging more loose earth.

An inexplicable shudder passed through Hiccup's body as he felt himself, dreamlike, pushing upwards to stand on mismatched feet. The movements were stiff, unnatural, as if fighting puppet strings or limbs weighed with invisible stones.

...he had never _done_ this before.

It was always Jack that untangled their bodies. It was Hiccup's place to cling, to burrow, to fall asleep there and drink up every lovely moment that they remained entwined. But for some reason he was ( _sit down...!_ ) standing, uncurling himself from the cold net of arms. And then he was walking ( _stop--!_ ), lopsided and clumsy, the metal stub of a leg sounding with an uneven clatter--

\--that rumble was so strong, so _familiar--_

"Hiccup--?!"

Jack was halfway to his feet, and Hiccup was halfway to the door.

And before he could even register Jack's order of ' _wait--!_ ', he was falling.

There was fire all around him. Or maybe there wasn't, maybe it was all inside of him. Maybe he had already hit the ground and this was just all that heat that Jack had pressed inside of him spilling out through the cracks. The only real disconnection he felt was the sharp lurch at the mouth of the cage as his weight tipped the balance, a sound of rusted metal as the fixture creaked on its chain -- but then it was far behind him and there was only wind rushing past his ears and fearling eyes blinking through and the sound of his own hummingbird heartbeat magnified a thousand times over.

 _Catch me_ , Hiccup thought randomly. It seemed to pop up into his head like a frozen speech bubble, tiny and clear as glass, until the roar of the wind and the hissing scream of nightmare men snatched it away again.

A hand snagged around his shoulders. Another around his knees. The first impact was muted, a collision of dead weight against airborne energy as Jack intercepted him mid-air, followed by the shock of his feet slamming their combined weight against the stone ground. Jack was saying something - screaming it, really - but at that moment the sounds from Above picked up with another lurching rumble and all Hiccup could hear was the fire in his own brain.

He didn't _understand._

He had hit the ground...there was a _memory_ of hitting the ground...

He _knew_ he did...

...but he _didn't_ , of course - he didn't. Jack was holding him, and he was in one piece, unharmed, totally and completely safe... 

...nobody had _caught_ him--

( _not important_ , the voice in his head corrected--)

\--but there had been an _impact._ Not just the sudden shock of Jack's feet absorbing the fall for him but a _real_ impact.

The kind you don't _live_ through.

More screaming. Someone else's, layering itself over Jack's climbing voice. He thought he could hear the distant rumble from Above reacting to it, multiplying in power -- but then there was a hand over his mouth and when it pulled away darkness pressed there instead, filling him up and silencing the sound. The fire in his chest and throat was indescribable, welling up wildly behind his closed lips. With no where else to go it tore at his insides, underneath his skin, desperate to find a new escape.

Hands on his face. It had to be Jack's hands, he'd know them anywhere, but the gray-skinned blob of a person he was staring back at had gone far too blurry to tell. There was liquid on his cheeks and the hands were scrubbing at them, over and over as they reappeared fresh. 

He had seen Jack in a panic before, but never like this. 

The gag wouldn't let him apologize. Hiccup tried to make contact with his eyes, but they were leaking too much to do any good. Soon enough, Jack had sealed darkness over them, too. 

He was aware of a whispering, far away and sinister, like another creature's lullaby. A quietness settling back in his brain, buzzing, the drone of a far-away power singing him to sleep.

More than anything else, he was aware of the weight of someone holding him.

 

\----

 

When Hiccup opened his eyes, there was nothing there but blackness.

It didn't seem strange, at first. Countless times he had woken up blind, cloaked heavily in darkness, or found Jack pressed so impossibly close that his shape blurred out the world like a liquid shadow. 

So Hiccup just closed his eyes again, peacefully and without question. He could wait here for hours. He had before. There was plenty to keep him happy, after all. Noises upon the air, faint and almost domestic in their familiarity. A brittleness, like clicking teeth. The hollow whispering that fearling wisps made as they slid through empty spaces, leaving a chill in their wake. And...

...and another voice, calling for him.

Not Jack's voice, or the Nightmare King's, or even a human voice at all. A _roaring._ From somewhere up above his head there was a needy weight pushing, pushing, shrieking and demanding...

 _Okay, okay,_ Hiccup thought sleepily. _I'm up..._

He stretched out his arms, and--

...and his arms wouldn't move. Hiccup tried to open his mouth, only to find a pressure sealed over his lips - a shadow, of course -- _Jack had left it there,_ he remembered suddenly. The reminder alone calmed the twitchy panic already jumping into his limbs -- this was all his master's doing. He was safe. The bonds and shadow gag were an order, a direction for him to take comfort in - no moving, no talking...

Safe....

The roaring picked up, and Hiccup felt himself thrash in automatic response, straining senselessly against his bonds. He could feel where the shadows curled around his wrists, fixing them neatly behind his back. And despite the safety, the _importance.._ that sound of calling from above was something he couldn't ignore.

He curled and uncurled his fingers, struggling with all his might and _wanting_ with a fierceness that was utterly alien to him...and there - _there_ \- something seemed to fall away and the shadows were melting off of him. He ripped his hands from behind his back in a frenzy, clawing at his face in his rush to peel the gag from his mouth. It took a few tries until the shadow began to weaken, and even then he couldn't get his voice to form - Hiccup's breath was coming quick and short, as if Jack's hands were on his throat again, squeezing...

_\--but not important._

He stumbled to the cage's door, clumsy on the bad leg. That sound was so all-consuming, like a war declaration. Ferocious. And he knew, somehow, that it had been waiting for him to answer back for a long time.

Missing him for a long time.

Hiccup's hands fumbled at the bars.

_Closed._

Right. _Right._ His master must have closed it... it must have -- because he _fell_ \-- because he walked right out the open door and -- he -- gods, that _sound_ \-- he couldn't _think._ There were bars in the way and they needed to _go._ Hiccup pushed through with his hands, forcing an arm up to the shoulder between the cold steel and scrambling at the lock on the outside. He had seen what Jack would do with it before, although he had never had a reason to care or study the exact movements. He did know that there was shadow involved. Twisting it into a shape, like a key. His fingers were slippery on the metal, and the shadows as slick as water around his hands, but by some miracle a heavy _click_ broke through the air and the door was swinging open on its hinges and---

Hiccup swung his legs over the side, heart hammering. The drop below seemed to stretch on forever. He pushed with his feet and incredibly, the shadow pushed _back_ at him, taking him a step away from the cage - then two - before weakening and falling away entirely.

For one wild, senseless moment, there was no up or down, above and below -- just darkness and air, the stony stairways of the Nightmare King's lair spiraling and yellow nightmare eyes blinking open in clips like the colored streaks of fireworks. His fall, once again, was muted - something that was not Jack caught him before he even had the chance to really gain momentum. The shadows, maybe -- fearling hands. Hiccup didn't know. His mind felt sluggish, too hazy and drugged to follow up on the thought. 

Forcing himself up on trembling legs was a task, and for a long moment, it seemed an impossible one. But soon the rumbling was picking up again, just as chaotic and desperate as ever, and Hiccup found himself once again with the strength to push forward.

One step in front of the other, the uneven clatter of metal and flesh feet. The animal screaming was his compass, an invisible rope upon the air that Hiccup clung to blindly for direction. There was an uncomfortable fluttering stuck his throat...a heartbeat, probably. There was nothing else it could be, but it sounded so different when it was going wild on its own like that, without Jack's pulse thudding alongside to help. Unsettling, like a thousand moth wings struggling to uncurl themselves between his lungs, tickling the backs of his eyes and making his hands shake and shake. His body seemed to move on its own - not in the way that Jack would inspire, the thoughtless filling of negative spaces and the easy way their mouths fit together. This _hurt._

Hiccup stumbled over stone and shadow, arms out for balance, listening to his own heartbeat quicken. The Nightmare King's lair was a labyrinth, narrow as a coffin in places but stretching on endlessly in others. Sometimes the floor would elevate suddenly, or melt away into crooked stairs. Other times it would vanish completely, the gaping dark of sudden drops indistinguishable from the solid slices of black stone. Hiccup picked himself up when he fell, crawled when he hadn't the strength to walk, pushed himself in desperation to his feet when the roaring burst through with enough adrenaline to spur him on anew. 

At some point his hand found its way before him, fingers outstretched, as if the sound was a physical thing he could reach out and touch. Where the darkness became thicker his arm appeared disembodied against it, a pale slice of freckled gray skin standing out against space, impossibly bright with no source of light to illuminate it. He watched it as if it were a lantern, something other than himself leading the way. He watched the fingers twitch and tremble as the volume from Above paused and picked up again.

He watched as another hand, twice as large and perfectly steady, tore itself without warning from the dark and locked painfully around his wrist. 

Hiccup froze. 

By coincidence, so did the roaring. For a moment it was as if time itself had shuddered to a stop, and even the heartbeat thudding within his own head became a din of white noise. His outstretched hand had gone as still as a statue, numb where the other was squeezing. It wasn't pale skinned, threaded with blue veins like Jack's hand was - this was shades darker, solid and rough as shark-skin. Hiccup could see the cracks in its nails from where they they were half-sunken into his flesh.

He couldn't summon the bravery to speak. It seemed like a bad idea to even try. He didn't know the Nightmare King like he knew Jack, but he understood that Pitch Black was a different creature entirely. 

Hiccup knew him before, but mostly in the low whisper of his laugh and the imprints of his hands on snowy skin, an undeniable but ever-present phantom in their midst. He couldn't remember having ever felt his touch before. His instinct was to lower his head in submission, whisper a word, any sign of offered compliance - but his mouth might as well have been gagged again and his body was frozen to the spot in fear. Even the possibility of shifting his gaze seemed impossible to entertain, so Hiccup kept his eyes fixed ahead, sightless.

He wanted Jack, suddenly and childishly. Someone to give him direction, a clear order to follow.

The roaring picked up again, and a new sound bled into the air to join it - a cry at first, wet and raw, which quickly turned into a high, strained wailing. It took a moment for him to recognize the keening as his own fault. 

The Nightmare King did not silence him. He listened for a moment, as still as stone, the harshness of his grasp unwavering. 

Then, slowly, he forced Hiccup's hand back to his hip and side-stepped into view.

His shape was looming, oblong somehow, like the optical illusion of a shadow stretched over a larger mass. Hiccup wouldn't allow his eyes to focus on the details - there was an instinctual memory there of the dangers of meeting a greater power's stare. So instead he processed shapes - the long triangle jaw, black line of a mouth. A coffin's tapering of shoulders to waist. Two fingers slid themselves beneath his chin, angling his jaw upwards to better examine his face. Hiccup's blood was ice within him.

A new crescendo of calling from above. His own voice swelled in answer. He couldn't keep quiet despite his terror; the whimpering bled from his lips like blood from a wound. 

( _go away, please go..._ )

Inexplicably, the touch lifted from his jaw. Pitch Black's blurry shape shifted, leaving space enough for him to walk through. 

"...go on." he urged quietly. His voice was tar. 

It was an order, technically. It didn't feel like one.

"I'm not stopping you, you realize. If you have someone else to attend to, I wouldn't keep them waiting."

Hiccup couldn't move.

" _No...?_ " The tone was politely surprised, almost sweet. He was talking to a child.

He couldn't...

"Well, then."

_...think..._

And then Pitch's hand was back on his face that that was it. There was no option anymore, no chance left to take. Cool fingers slid over his skin like rain, practiced and clinical, brushing over his forehead beneath the bangs. Stopping beneath his eyelid, pausing again at his throat. Counting the heartbeats. His motionlessness was a primal thing, the fear from predator to prey when there was nothing left to do but play dead, stay as silent and still as possible to minimize retaliation.

Despite this, Hiccup couldn't stop his sobbing.

It wasn't like him to behave in any way other than he was instructed, or to lose control of some part of himself so thoroughly...Jack would have gagged him, he thought longingly. He would have put a stop to it right away, silenced the sound with his hands or his cock. Lulled him from his misery until he was sleeping again, serene. Hiccup yearned for that freedom, the bliss of having his choice taken away and letting Jack think for him completely.

But this wasn't Jack. This was Pitch, and Pitch listened to every cracked note, every wavering inflection that the sounds from above drew in agony from his mouth. For a beat that stretched on an eternity, he let Pitch's hands make their slow crawl over his face, drink up the tremors in his skin and listen to the sound of him breaking. 

And when Hiccup had finally drained himself at last of the strength to wail, Pitch snatched his wrist back up in one long-fingered hand and tugged.

The pull was different than any he had experienced. Rather than falling down, Hiccup fell _through_ , as though the shadows beneath their feet were only fragile bridges to cover darker, hidden depths. Teleporting through shadow was something he had never experienced himself - there was never any reason to, before. For as long as he could remember, his home had been his cage, and anything beyond that was meaningless.

It was his cage he found himself blinking back into now, when the popping in his ears had subsided and the press of shadows had eased up their stranglehold grip. The bars appeared smaller with the two of them contained inside together, filling up more space than Hiccup could ever manage alone, even when Jack was there to help. He fell to the floor when his wrist was released from its tight hold, not on instruction but merely for lack of strength to stand. The Nightmare King observed him there for a moment, head canted slightly, before kneeling down at his side and placing a cool hand on his knee.

The sounds from Above had stopped completely.

He was aware that he should be grateful for that. It was too painful, that noise. Too confusing. And the Nightmare King's hand on his leg felt so much more real now with nothing else to distract him from the touch. Hiccup stared at the cage ceiling, chest heaving, as the stony fingers slid down to his calf, just above the prosthetic, and stroked place where flesh turned to metal.

He waited, patient and unmoving except for the slow, purposeful draw of his finger over the amputation scars, tracing the seam. Hiccup did not pause to consider what he could be waiting for until the cage rattled with a newly added weight, an uneven lurching that could only mean one thing. 

Sure enough, the unlocked door gave a creak of protest as Jack wrenched it roughly open, winded and blinking.

"You're late." Pitch said thoughtfully, not looking up.

"I know." He raked a hand through his hair, sticking the few smoothed down locks stubbornly back on end. There was a cut on his cheek, just below his right eye. It was bleeding, fresh. "I _know._ It's...." He paused for a moment in mid-step, as if just now realizing their position. "....what are you doing?"

The finger paused on its path. Pitch flattened his palm over the metal stump, then slid his hand carefully downward to the prosthetic where Hiccup could no longer register contact. "I explained something when I fetched him for you, remember." he prompted coldly.

Jack let his hand fall from his hair to the back of his neck, sheepish. He toed at the floor evasively, mumbling something Hiccup couldn't hear. "...my responsibility...." The tail end was barely audible through a sigh. "But--"

"A stray fearling... barely an infant, really... wandering alone where anyone could pluck him up for their own purposes...and if by chance he were to find his way back to us unharmed, he could bring any stranger along with him--"

"It was an accident..." Jack broke in quickly, smiling in a way that was beginning to look scared.

"--unless perhaps his people were willing to welcome him back into their care? They had always been so _accepting_ of him before, hadn't they?"

"...I...."

"...ah...so, poor _thing_ , he'd be alone again."

"I...I didn't mean to..." Hiccup had never heard his master's voice like this. It sounded glassy, impossibly small. "I didn't know he'd...." From the corner of his eye, he saw the Fearling Prince begin to pace, his head darting back from Hiccup's position on the floor to the open cage door, putting the pieces together. "...he's never _done_ that before! I didn't even know he _could!_ "

"Didn't know a fearling would have some measure of influence over shadow?" Pitch asked evenly.

"It was _my_ shadow." Jack corrected, clenching and unclenching his fingers. "Why would he even _want_ to...?"

The question hung in their air between them. Hiccup saw Pitch's hands move a fraction, doing something to his foot that he couldn't discern. Jack continued to pace, chewing on his knuckles between breaths and throwing worried glances around his legs.

"When I turned him..." the Nightmare King interrupted him at last, "what did you feel?"

"...uh... _good._ " Jack replied, pausing in his steps. His voice flared back to it's previous brightness, face splitting into a cat's grin. " _Really_ good....tighter than I imagined, even."

"His _fear_ , you fool boy." Pitch snarled impatiently, and Jack cackled with amusement, holding his hands up in surrender. "What did you feel in his _fear?_ "

"I don't know...just - a big tidal wave of it, really." The Prince stared between them for a moment, his feet planted firmly apart. Hiccup could feel blue eyes pinned on his body, digging up an old memory. "He wanted help." he added vaguely, an afterthought.

The Nightmare King went very still.

"...but I helped him, so it's all alright now." Jack finished in a shrug, some of that smile creeping back into his voice. 

Silence.

"...Pitch?" 

There was a crackling in the air, a sizzle of ozone. The hissing rush of nightmare sand forming. Jack faltered, edging a step closer. "...what are..." 

Pitch's other hand appeared above his knee, gripping for balance. A sharp whine pierced the air, the sound of metal being twisted, creaking through the rust. 

Jack's voice was climbing to a height Hiccup had never heard before. 

"Pitch, come on, that's not _fair!_ "

" _Your_ responsibility, as I told you." Pitch answered back curtly. "The moment he steps outside his boundaries, he becomes _my_ responsibility." A screw clattered to the floor. Pitch's hand leveled around his thigh, holding him steady as the prosthetic was removed. "...it's a poor replica of a limb, isn't it?" he added in cold distaste.

Jack made a strange noise in the back of his throat, somewhere between crying and laughing.

"They're Vikings, they're...not all that into 'pretty'...." he started nervously, tapping his nails fretfully against the bars. "...I _like_ his legs, Pitch....he does this, this thing where he wraps them real tight around you..."

Pitch gave a disinterested hum.

"Like leverage, you know? So he can thrust back. He'll ride you like he's starved or something, it's really... _really_ awesome..."

"If he finds his way out again, the other one will have to go." The Nightmare King tapped his flesh foot politely.

Jack trailed off, wide-eyed.

"A shame, as you enjoy it so much."

"Pitch...."

"But he doesn't need to stand to serve the purpose you use him for."

"Pitch, _please_ , I said it was an accident!" His hands were back at his head, tangling through the frosted black locks in frustration. "I'm _sorry_ , okay?" 

The hand slid off his thigh as the Nightmare King glided back to his feet, tossing something carelessly aside as he straightened. It clattered loudly against the bars and landed within the space to his left. Hiccup flinched automatically at the sudden explosion of metallic sound. His left leg, when it twitched in response, felt lighter than before.

Pitch opened his arms. 

Jack rushed to fill the space between them immediately, burrowing as the dark hands closed slowly and graciously around him. 

"It's not what _I_ want, Jack." he soothed. "I'm looking out for _you_ ; it's all for your protection. If he were to compromise us..."

"He's not _going_ to!" Jack's voice came back muffled, bitter. "It's not going to happen again. He was just - he was scared. He got scared and he acted a little funny, he's still getting used to everything. And he...he wouldn't be able to join us ever, if you...you said that someday he could..."

"I said if he was good."

"He _is_ good!" Jack burst out, curling his fists against the Nightmare King's chest. "I love him, Pitch! You would too, if you just...!"

...it was his foot. That's what Pitch threw aside. Hiccup straightened his legs, marveling at the unexpected bite of the remaining metal screeching against the steely ground. He supposed he should feel bothered by the loss - Jack was upset, and usually that was enough to warrant discomfort from Hiccup too - but there was a numbness in his chest that had settled in the moment the Nightmare King pulled him back into his cage, and the notion of feeling anything at all seemed as impossible as getting out again.

"I know it hurts..." His voice floated over their heads, as soothing as a lullaby. "But it's for your own safety. For _all_ of our safety. You understand, don't you?"

"Yeah." Jack whispered tightly.

"I'm saving you." Pitch repeated quietly, combing his fingers through Jack's dark hair with practiced tenderness. 

"I know..." Jack rasped. "I _love_ you. I really do, Pitch, I love you..."

Hiccup closed his eyes.

 

\---

 

There were more fearlings around than before. They gathered like tongs of flame below the suspended floor, sliding their inky hands along the steel exterior to soak up his fear. Hiccup could hear them whispering, even when he wasn't conscious to pick up on their sound. Dreaming in Pitch Black's realm wasn't like the fleeting thing Jack described from above - these were experiences that stretched on for ages, as vivid as waking hours and nearly impossible to sort apart. 

Hiccup knew the difference because when he was awake, the bars were back around him, sectioning off the sinking ruins in slices of monochrome. Jack never left the door to his cage open again. The lock was gone completely now, fused in place instead with a measure of shadow and nightmare sand, leaving it indiscernible from the the rest of the structure.

When Jack wanted to come in, he teleported through the dark.

Hiccup tried to greet him the first few times, but the missing leg made it impossible to stand, and even gripping at the bars for support took too much strength. After his venture through the Nightmare Realm - after the clear impossibility of reaching that distant voice -- strength was a difficult thing to muster. The Fearling Prince took a habit of coaxing him to stillness when he came in, though out of love or pity he couldn't tell. Hiccup could feel how disturbed he was through the tremors in his hands, the wild roundness to his eyes that spoke of things other than pleasure, than safety -- reflections in the blue that he was not familiar with. 

They didn't play the same way either. Maybe it was because Hiccup could no longer greet him the same way. But Jack still kissed him all over, sucked on each finger in turn before stopping at his wrist, holding his lips over the pulse. Sometimes he crawled over him, sealed the space between their bodies with frightful softness, or pulled him carefully into his arms. Sometimes he just paced the cage again, talking and talking, waving his hands about wildly to paint a picture on the air.

Hiccup listened to stories about war and carnage, a village that treated a lovely little boy like trash, and a savior that tucked the child somewhere far far away where the sunlight couldn't burn his skin anymore.

When he slept, he dreamed of blizzards and the snap of teeth. Hair the color of fire. An open sky that crashed down all around him in shards. 

Sometimes, that strange screaming called for him again from beyond the cage, and the nightmares became stranger things as the roaring raged on to feed it. He dreamed of crawling through mud with two flesh feet, stitching up an open wound with red hands and a brittle line of silver pinched between his fingers. He dreamed of black wings against a blanket the color of Jack's eyes, folding in on themselves and stretching out again like tattered rags. 

When he woke he could feel the empty space on his left side more completely than he had ever felt it before, as if a phantom limb was twitching there, trying to earn its circulation back.

Mostly, he just slept. He could block out the shaking of his cage from where the Nightmare's lean, animal bodies nudged against it it. He could tune out their snorting and whining, close-creeping sounds as they tried to push their noses ravenously through the bars. 

A cackling voice washed over him, low and clear like a funeral bell. "Rise and shine lazy bones, you gotta get up sometime..."

 _Yes_ , Hiccup thought. It came to him easily, the compulsion to agree. He reached out, wanting, for some inexplicable, instinctual reason, to feel the warm texture of scales and the burn of a powerful, beautiful heart. 

The skin against his palm was stone-cold.

...he was so _tired..._

"Open your eyes, okay? Come on, look at me..." 

Hiccup tried to. There was a hand against his cheek, stroking, and it was so, so nice. It was bliss.

"Come on, look at me! Wake up, Hic, up, come on..."

_Five more minutes..._

"That's it sweetheart, there you go...." There was a coolness on his forehead. Kisses. "You love me, right? Tell me you love me."

"Yeah..." Hiccup rasped wetly.

"Yeah, you do... " Jack repeated, drawing a vertical line over the dampness on his cheek, from his eyelid to the corner of his mouth. "Say it. Say you love me."

 _Yes,_ Hiccup thought, _yes._

"And I love you, too."

_You own me._

"You know that, right?"

_Yeah, of course. Of course I do._

Fingers on his wrist again, checking the pulse. They were gone almost as soon as they appeared. Jack's feet, bare and restless, pacing and pacing around him. "Why don't we have a little _fun_ , Hic...? Like old times. We haven't fucked for _ages_...whaddya say? You wanna go a round?"

_Please..._

"It'll probably chase the Nightmares off. I, I told them to leave you alone." Jack huffed, crouching down on his haunches beside him. "They smell your fear, that's why they're like that. You're dripping with it...I don't know _why_..." he added, exacerbated. "I told you you're safe. I _told_ you that..."

His voice was like a rush of cold water, sucking oxygen from the air. Hiccup thought of altitudes, misty clouds and a wide open sky washed over with light. He couldn't remember ever seeing such a thing before. It felt alien in his head, like a photograph slid into his brain, someone else's memory.

"Hey...." Jack's voice was a low, breaking whine. "Look at me, Hic." Chilly fingers slipped under his chin, tilting his jaw upward. "Come on, I'm right here. I'm right in front of you! _Look!_ "

Hiccup looked. There were blue eyes in front of him. Primary blue, as if someone had carved them from marble and painted in the irses by hand. He was so beautiful, so pale it almost stung the senses. It was like walking outside into the blinding glare of a snowstorm, untouched by footprints and undisturbed by wind. Hiccup wanted to stagger backwards, shield his burning eyes, but Jack said _look_ , so he looked.

"You see me, right?" Jack whispered. "Hiccup?" 

The fingers tightened, sliding from underneath his jaw to grasp roughly at his face. His nails sank in, digging into Hiccup's cheeks, biting fresh bruises into his skin. "You see me, don't you...? That was the _deal!_ I save you and you _see_ me....come on, don't do this. Don't do this..." Those blue eyes were impossibly wide. "Can't you hear me..?! Hiccup?! _Look at me!_ "

_Yes. Okay. Yes...._

" _LOOK at me!_ " Jack raged. His grip seared like a brand, the shape of fingerprints in a fan across his jaw. Someone else's pain. He jerked Hiccup forward by his face, tipping his balance, then shoved him with sudden, hysterical fury on his back. The cage floor was cold enough to be fire, and the shock of bare metal across his shoulders sent shivers burning through. There were fearling eyes in the distance, yellow specks of light. A bright note of fear upon the air, but not his own. It was a different flavor than his own - thick and heady as smoldering coals, sharp as singed mint leaves. The taste crawled into his mouth, sticking like honey in his throat as Jack kicked his legs open. 

A muted thud from his right foot. Heavily clattering of the remaining metal stump from his left. Roaring in the distance; a creature crying and shaking the earth. Jack was mounting him and this time there were no hands locked around his throat but all the same he couldn't find the air to breathe.

It had been a while, since. He was used to it back then, ready to go in a second, but he wasn't loose now the way he before was when this happened every night, and even then his master was never so desperate to have them joined. He felt like a fading thing, drained of blood. Jack must have thought so, too. The violence with which he forced them together was as if he thought Hiccup might disappear from beneath him at any second. 

Something was tightening in his chest. A phantom hand, squeezing. He wanted to move - he _had_ to move, Jack _needed_ him to -- but it was like his body had become stone, a dead weight he couldn't manage. So Jack moved hard for the both of them, wild and desperate, angry. Every impact of his hips nudged him harder against the floor, etching bruises into his shoulder blades and the bumps of his spine. He watched his hand shaking, pale gray with the fingers all curled like a crushed spider, twitching with every thrust.

Hiccup wondered when the sky had crept in so low. He thought could almost touch the clouds.

He felt empty when Jack slipped out of him. He let one leg thump to the floor, the other - the one that ended just below the knee - hitting hard and reverberating through the steel beneath him. He felt the trickle of wetness inside his thigh, the growing heaviness of the prince's shadow swallowing him up as he stood, hunched and panting. Jack screamed himself hoarse and Hiccup didn't blink, didn't pick his head up from where his owner had left it turned on the floor. He kept on looking, like Jack had ordered him to. At the darkness, blinking back at him with its yellow eyes. At his hand, laying there like a mannequin's hand and no longer twitching.

" _He doesn't even **MOVE** anymore!_ " Jack roared, his voice raw and exploding into the darkness. "It's like _fucking a **CORPSE...!** I TOLD_ you we needed the dragon, why didn't you _listen!? You **BROKE** him!!_ "

" _I_ broke him?" a voice whispered back, dangerously quiet, and Hiccup saw the shivering line of Jack's shadow freeze to stillness. 

There was a sudden, telling coldness in the air that had nothing to do with fearlings or frost. Hiccup felt rather than saw the darkness around them bristle with power as the form of a monster detached itself elegantly from the mass.

" _I broke him?_ " the Nightmare King repeated softly, and Jack shuddered, tipping his jaw back and exposing his throat for Pitch's fingers to slide over. "He was broken already, _look_ at him. I told you you could have any toy you wanted, and you had to insist upon the one with parts already _missing._ " 

Jack was silent, shoulders a downward slope like a melting column, adam's apple working between the black tar of Pitch's grasp. "I _wanted_ him." he whispered back at last, low and fierce with all the spoiled entitlement of a favorite child.

"Yes," Pitch said sweetly. "And now you have him." Hiccup could feel the glass-gold cut of his eyes scanning over him with a sneer of disgust. "...needy, inconvenient thing that he is."

"No, I have _half_ of him. Pretty soon I'll have none of him." The fear was palpable: even a lesser fearling like Hiccup was all but drowning in it. "He needs the dragon -- that's _all_ we needed for him--"

"--what we _needed_ a clean turning. He was supposed to be focused foremost on you - you were to be the focal point in his mind. You neglected to tell me he was already bound to another."

"He _wasn't!_ \-- he _isn't!_ Nobody gave a _fuck_ about him! Nobody but me..."

"Clearly, someone did."

"But I told you we needed the dragon, didn't I? I told you he'd break without it! I _told_ you...."

The shadows shifted. The Nightmare King, long and lean as a grim reaper, and Jack pressing into him pleadingly, sinking into the stranglehold touches as if they were a safe haven. His voice was different now - throaty and intimate; the last, desperate trick tucked up his sleeve. " _Please_ , Pitch. I promise he'll be worth it. I've seen him kill giants. He turned his whole world upside down _without_ our help. He's _special._ Imagine what he could do with us behind him...?"

"Imagine."

" _Please._ " Jack begged. "He'll surprise you. I promise he will. I know you'll be impressed with him, we just gotta fix him up, give him the right tools. Get him working all nice and smooth again. You should hear him when he gets to talking, he's so stubborn, he's so _funny._ You're gonna love him, I swear, he's, he's...."

"...ah."

"-- you have to believe me, Pitch, please, _please..._ "

Dirt fell from above in chunks. A body throwing its weight against the earth, pausing only to breathe for more fire. Hiccup thought he could hear the sounds of digging through the thing's continuous, angry screams. 

The Nightmare King heard it, too. 

"My dear boy," he muttered distractedly, "I've spoiled you..."

His fanged mouth was centimeters from Jack's, but his attention was elsewhere. _Above_ , Hiccup thought blankly. That's the only other place there was. Here, in the below - his cage, his home...and _there_ , the place he had never even considered until the night Jack ordered him to scream and something _else_ screamed back. The place where another living being called for him. 

Above.

 

\-----

 

After that night, Jack didn't touch him. Time passed, and the clockwork visits of the Fearling Prince within the darkness of his confinement slowed and slowed until they finally stopped. He caught glimpses of him now and then - blue eyes peering through the bars, the flash of a scared, twitchy smile born entirely of nervous energy - but the touch of his hands was missing entirely until Hiccup began to forget what the _important_ things felt like. Things like skin on cold skin, the sting of teeth on his neck, or being filled to the brim on his back or stomach or his knees. Things like being owned, in a position where he had nothing left except to _be_ owned. 

He was a possession not important enough for his master's touch, a thing that had broken upon impact. He remembered the fall, a distant thing from a distant time - streaking like a comet through fire, screaming to be caught. Whoever was supposed to catch him didn't, so here he was with his bones all shattered and his insides leaking out. There were words once, things he understood, little threads of direction to cling to and follow. They had been carved into his skin by Jack's nails and pointed teeth, but time had blurred the letters over until he couldn't recall the phrasing anymore.

Over nights, Jack's face beyond the bars began to appear in red. There was a line of it from his lip to his chin one day, a smear across his forehead the next. Hiccup was fascinated by the color, something he knew in a basic sense but had never really seen before until Jack came peeking in at him with streaks of it across his gray-washed skin. The crooked staff in his hand was streaked with frost ferns. Usually, for their games, he had set it apart...but they didn't play anymore, of course, so Jack kept it glued to his side.

He needed it, if he was beginning to bleed. Deep down, he knew the signs. Jack had been fighting something. 

Someone.

He still talked during their visits ( _i love you stop that get up it's gonna be alright i promise im saving you i_ ) but Hiccup couldn't listen. There were sounds from Above sometimes, but Hiccup couldn't answer. His brain was filled with mist, an aimlessness that had settled in heavily from the disconnection. A compulsion to agree, on the surface. A blankness of nothing to agree _to._

And beneath that an alien fury, a stubborn thing in the very back of his mind, picking at his surroundings for ways out and finding none. Listening to the Above-sounds and straining for a name to put to the voice. Something that dug tunnels through his ribs and prodded at his heart and said things like _are you stupid? or just crazy? this isn't love._

On the day that it ended, Jack perched outside his cage, forehead to the steel, and said nothing at all.

The Nightmare King came to collect him with a hand to the small of his back. And for a while there was nothing, nothing, nothing outside or inside of him and nothing all around, and Pitch was whispering, _he's stopped singing, you realize - your canary_ , and Jack's hands were stranglehold tight on the bars.

It was moments before the high-pitched whine of the sound barrier breaking. 

Moments before his world exploded. 

Moments before dust billowed up into the air and the Nightmares were screaming, an army surging in to fight, before the fire hit his cage and he was staring up at metal with a hole blasted through it, the bent bars twisted and glowing red with heat. Smoke bled from the steel in currents, blocking out the beat of jet black wings. Hiccup's mouth was open, like he was trying to scream, but something else was screaming for him and it was a thousand times stronger: a dragon's rage.

The cage floor tilted beneath him. He could hear the chain whining in its struggle to hold. 

A hand on his wrist, ripping him from the wreckage before it collapsed entirely.

 _Oh,_ Hiccup thought, hollow.

An inky shape was thrashing in the fog. The roaring was deafening at this range, blasting out all possible thought and leaving nothing left in his brain except for that _sound_. It made him burn - everywhere, burning - his eyes and his brain and his heart - an entirely different spectrum of heat than the icy bite his master would sear into him.

Hiccup wasn't in the center of the din for long. Whoever had pulled him from the chaos quickly set him down on lower, solid ground and was off in a flash. Hiccup flattened his hands out over the new terrain - cool stone bathed in shadow - and pushed to get his head and shoulders off the floor. Moving again when he had been still for so long wasn't an easy task, but it seemed quite suddenly like the most important thing he could ever attempt to do. 

There was a body in front of him, facing away. It wasn't a fearling, or any other creature of darkness. Not the Prince, or the Nightmare King. It wasn't even _human_. The size of it was staggering - easily larger than a full grown Nightmare and solid on all the angles where the shadow creatures flickered and twitched. 

And there were _wings._ Not ragged, wind-bitten things like Hiccup had dreamed of, but spiny and sharp, stretched out protectively before him. Its back was hunched low, hackles raised. Growling, spitting. Red splashed about its tail - not a liquid red, like Jack had worn on his skin, but bloodlessly bright. A banner.

 _Fin_ , something in his head corrected numbly. _Tail fin._

There was a skull painted on it, the very color of bone.

Nightmares surged forward, and the creature lunged to meet them. Hiccup watched its teeth snap over the dark sand of the horses necks, claws raking over the purple-black shapes of calves and slithering manes until they dissolved away in defeat. The tail fin thrashing back and forth, a waving hand of red. Despite the sheer _number_ of its opponents, the dragon had a determination they could not match, diving in to fight fearlessly where the Nightmares shrank back until even the most hardened of foes were cowering in fear. 

And then there was a bite of laughter - a warning - before its accompanying bolt of frost splintered like lightening over the air. Jack was there, lithe and battle-ready, faster than Hiccup had ever seen him move.

But the dragon was faster. 

His master darted in close - for a second, just a second -- and a great black paw slammed down over his throat, pinning him effortlessly to the ground. The staff went spinning, the white frost vanishing from its wooden surface the moment his fingers lost their connection.

The dragon's jaw stretched wide, and all along the inside lay the spikes of white teeth--

( _Could have sworn..._ Hiccup thought randomly.)

\--through a bubble of building gas and the sparks of a nearing explosion, and Jack was screaming and Hiccup was screaming along with him and somehow, unexpectedly, the creature _heard._

The dragon's mouth snapped closed just inches from Jack's face and whipped around to look straight at him. 

Hiccup saw green-gold eyes, round saucers of intelligent life with the pupils blown wide and worried. There was a bubbling kind of purr coming from the dragon's throat, a motherly sound he had never heard before, but it drew something from him that he couldn't explain away, a feeling of safeness totally unlike anything Jack had instilled in him. 

" _H-hey..._ " Hiccup croaked. 

His voice sounded raspy, disconnected. It wasn't the sound he heard around Jack, the throaty, eager tone he was so used to being coaxed from him. This was higher, sweeter, bursting with a passionate gratitude, like he was being gifted his first real breath of pure air and realizing, quite suddenly, that he had been taking it in wrong all along.

The dragon's paw flexed against Jack's neck. The Fearling Prince was hissing in pain, fingers clawing uselessly at muscular creature's arm. Ice formed in brittle, uneven ferns over its scales.

The dragon twisted to face him, not letting up its grip, and Hiccup saw a kind of horror in the beast's face that made his chest ache.

He tried to crawl forward. The dragon leaned in for him, claws still skewered tight around Jack's sprawled form. Hiccup saw his own tiny hand reaching out for his muzzle, trembling. 

He had known this sight, before. 

His palm met with scales, cool and dry. He could feel the resonance of the dragon's breathing rippling from the center of his hand down through his arm and into his chest, into his brain, clearing out the smoke that had settled there.

 _Toothless_ , he thought. The dragon nudged his cheek with its nose, a low, tangled sound emitting from its throat. Whimpering. From what seemed like a thousand miles away, Jack was calling for him, struggling to manage words from beneath the weight of the dragon's grasp. Hiccup felt a tug in his core, a need to answer, but the warmth against his face and the fierce burn of leathery scales was too lovely to ignore.

Hiccup nudged himself beneath the dragon's jaw and wrapped his arms around the wide, warm neck. His vision was going blurry again. It wasn't so alarming, this time.

"Hey there, bud..." he whispered. 

This part came so _naturally._ It was like being rewritten with the creature's heartbeat thudding against his cheek, breathing in secret words. He could feel the fury beginning to fade from its strong pulse, the grip on the Fearling Prince easing up enough to curl its wings with broken relief around Hiccup's shoulders. 

The air going cold, as another monster detached itself from the darkness.

Gold eyes blinking to life behind his back.

And the Nightmare King's savage growl as the black blade of his scythe sprung forward, burying itself into the dragon's back.

Hiccup had heard Toothless's scream before, a thousand times in his dreams and from far away, that distant rumble from the world of Above. But right beside him it was deafening, enough to rattle teeth and shake the sinking ruins to dust from beneath their knees. Hiccup clung with his hands to the trembling black form, running his fingers over its heaving chest. There was a place beneath its jaw that he seemed to know like a secret map, patches that his palms fit themselves into perfectly. "It's okay, it's _okay!_ " he stammered. "I'm right here bud, it's gonna be okay---"

The scythe was gone. There was no blood. Pitch Black was a looming shape over Toothless's wilting wings, his gray spider's hands splayed flat between the spiny shoulder blades. 

The dragon's great, shuddering breaths were beginning to even out.

"That's it, there you go buddy--," Hiccup babbled in a rush. He couldn't seem to stop. "I got you. I got you Toothless, we're okay now, we're -- we're good, we're all good..."

 _You caught me_ , he thought passionately, and suddenly it was all he could think, all he could say. Again and again, clutching Toothless's cold neck, blinking the liquid out of his eyes. " _You caught me, you -- **I** \- you're _amazing_ , you _caught_ me, you really, really _did..._ "_

Someone was laughing, weak and cold. Jack, it had to be Jack. He sounded strangled from the pressure on his neck, still getting his second wind back. But he'd be fine. He'd be alright. 

Everything was going to be alright. 

Pitch drew his hands back, his eyes as sharp as glass. His mouth was twisted into an open grimace, stepping back swiftly to get a better picture of the scene before him. Hiccup caught his gaze for a split second before remembering to avert his eyes. The dark line of Pitch's lips was stretched wide, sharp with discord and rage but already twitching upwards at the edges. 

He was looking at Hiccup with something like awe, like _hunger_ , as if he was something suddenly precious and newly promising. As if he were a weapon with the blade facing out, ready to be wielded. Jack was laughing still, weightless with it, but Pitch was perfectly quiet, the weight of his eyes still on Hiccup's back, mouth slightly open, staring still at the dragon and the boy together as if he had never seen them properly before until now. 

Hiccup nuzzled himself against Toothless's heart, crying with relief. The black wings were wrapped tight around him. He wanted nothing more than to nest there and fall asleep in his embrace. He had done so before, he thought. Again and again, before. As senseless and strange as it was, he _knew_ it. Just like he knew that the fire was real, the fall was real. Like he knew the creases of his master's palms and the easy place he belonged, inside of black stretch of sky with his other half and all the missing pieces of him slotted back into place. 

Hiccup buried his face into a warm, warm neck. And Toothless's eyes, when they opened again, were a fearling's gold. 


End file.
